custom_lint

Readme

About

Lint rules are a powerful way to improve the maintainability of a project. The more, the merrier!
But while Dart offers a wide variety of lint rules by default, it cannot reasonably include every possible lint. For example, Dart does not include lints related to third-party packages.

Custom_lint fixes that by allowing package authors to write custom lint rules.

Custom_lint is similar to analyzer_plugin, but goes deeper by trying to provide a better developer experience.

That includes:

• A command-line to obtain the list of lints in your CI without having to write a command line yourself.
• A simplified project setup.
  No need to deal with the analyzer server or error handling. Custom_lint takes care of that for you, so that you can focus on writing lints.
• Support for hot-restart.
  Updating the source code of a linter plugin will dynamically restart it, without having to restart your IDE/analyzer server
• Built-in support for // ignore: and // ignore_for_file:.
• Support for print(...) and exceptions.
  If your plugin somehow throws or print debug messages, custom_lint will generate a log file with the messages/errors.

Usage

Using custom_lint is split in two parts:

• how to define a custom_lint package
• how users can install our package in their application to see our newly defined lints

Creating a custom lint package

To create a custom lint, you will need two things:

• updating your pubspec.yaml to include custom_lint_builder as a dependency:

  # pubspec.yaml
  name: my_custom_lint_package
  environment:
    sdk: ">=2.16.0 <3.0.0"
  
  dependencies:
    # we will use analyzer for inspecting Dart files
    analyzer:
    # custom_lint_builder will give us tools for writing lints
    custom_lint_builder:
  

• create a bin/custom_lint.dart file in your project with the following:

  // This is the entrypoint of our custom linter
  void main(List<String> args, SendPort sendPort) {
    startPlugin(sendPort, _ExampleLinter());
  }
  
  // This class is the one that will analyze Dart files and return lints
  class _ExampleLinter extends PluginBase {
    @override
    Iterable<Lint> getLints(ResolvedUnitResult resolvedUnitResult) sync* {
      // A basic lint that shows at the top of the file.
      yield Lint(
        code: 'my_custom_lint_code',
        message: 'This is the description of our custom lint',
        // where your lint will appear within the Dart file.
        location: LintLocation.fromOffsets(
          offset: 0,
          length: 10,
        ),
      );
    }
  }
  

That's it for defining a custom lint package!

Let's use it in an application now.

Using our custom lint package in an application

For users to run custom_lint packages, there are a few steps:

• The application must contain an analysis_options.yaml with the following:

  analyzer:
    plugins:
      - custom_lint
  

• The application also needs to add custom_lint and our package(s) as dev dependency in their application:

  # The pubspec.yaml of an application using our lints
  name: example_app
  environment:
    sdk: ">=2.16.0 <3.0.0"
  
  dev_dependencies:
    custom_lint:
    my_custom_lint_package:
  

That's all!
After running pub get (and possibly restarting their IDE), users should now see our custom lints in their Dart files:

screenshot of our custom lints in the IDE

Obtaining the list of lints in the CI

Unfortunately, running dart analyze does not pick up our newly defined lints.
We need a separate command for this.

To do that, users of our custom lint package can run inside the application the following:

$ dart run custom_lint
  lib/main.dart:0:0 • This is the description of our custom lint • my_custom_lint_code